Amped Review: Wampler Triple Wreck

Bone crunching distortion with tone 25-Dec-12

The Wampler Triple Wreck is about as heavy a pedal as you can get. That sentence could be the review in itself, but as I have your attention, I may as well tell you all about the pedal, and why it would be my weapon of choice if I had to conquer an alien race with the power of heavy metal.

Features:The Wampler Triple Wreck was designed by Brian Wampler to be one of the heaviest pedals around, and he certainly didn't fail in that respect.

The phrase 'amp in a box' gets thrown around a lot, but if you are looking for the sound of a Peavey 5150, or a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier, and you can't afford to shell out the money for these sorts of amps, then the Wampler Triple Wreck would be a good alternative.

The pedal features a gain control, volume control, a three band EQ, and a contour shaper on the boost section. That's right, this pedal has a boost switch, just to make it even more crazy.

There is also a switch at the top of the pedal, which offers a choice of two 'voicings'. The 'hard' setting will give you a classic hard rock sound, and the brutal setting will give you a much more modern sound, with a tighter, bigger bottom end, and more presence at the high end.

Sounds:We try to cover the various sounds the pedal can produce in some depth in the video, but as a brief overview, it can do a lot.

The sheer amount of distortion you can draw from this amp means that you can have those extreme modern metal sounds, for chunky rhythms and full-spectrum mixes.

But reel the gain right back on the 'hard' mode, and you will get an early 70s distortion sound, it's a world away from the modern sounds, but that's what you get with the Triple Wreck - a full spectrum of distortion sounds.

The EQ is very responsive, and acts much as you would expect the EQ on an amplifier to react. Brian Wampler's done a great job here, the EQ is in fact my favourite part of the pedal, you can completely reshape the sound with the three band EQ.

On some pedals you tweak the EQ, and it doesn't really seem to have much effect. But on the Wampler Triple Wreck, the smallest of tweaks can make it sound like an entirely different pedal. I'm very impressed by this.

Build Quality:The Triple Wreck is in the standard encasing for Wampler pedals, and uses the standard components. Good build quality, everything feels solid and substantial, and I've personally never met anybody who has had a complaint about the build quality of Wampler pedals.

Round Up:The cost of the Triple Wreck is $269.97, this is possibly the only downside. There's no denying that anything upward of $200 is at the higher end of the pedal market in terms of pricing.

But don't make the mistake of comparing the Triple Wreck to standard 'distortion' pedals, it's much more than that. You might use a standard distortion pedal to get a particular sound, but with the Triple Wreck, you can get any number of sounds.

You are buying a great distortion tone, a box of tricks with which you can't really go wrong. If you know what tone you're after, you can probably get it with the Triple Wreck.

If you're a guitarist and you are serious about your heavy metal tone, you should very much consider the Triple Wreck.

Pro - Great range of sounds, responsive EQ, a pedal designed for those who know what they want and know how to get it.

Cons - Can get pretty fuzzy on the low end when the gain is maxed out in boost mode, but this is still very much a useable sound for the right person.